Intel announced their results yesterday for last quarter (and the year). And they were good financially. As Brian Krzanich said:The fourth quarter marked a strong finish to a great year. We began 2014 expecting roughly flat year-over-year revenue and operating income. Instead the company’s full year revenue grew 6% touching… Read More
Author: Paul McLellan
ASE and Brewer Science Win SEMI Award
Tuesday night was the SEMI awards banquet at ISS in Half Moon Bay. The SEMI Award was established in 1979 to recognize outstanding technical achievement and meritorious contribution in the areas of Semiconductor Materials, Wafer Fabrication, Assembly and Packaging, Process Control, Test and Inspection, Robotics and Automation,… Read More
eSilicon Try IP Before You Buy
I’ve written before about eSilicon’s IP Marketplace. This is the latest in several steps to automate more and more of the interface between eSilicon and its customers: MPW quotes, production quotes, tracking orders through manufacturing, and now IP quotes. There is a phrase in software development called “eating… Read More
SEMI ISS: The Outlook
I spent Monday at the SEMI ISS meeting in Half Moon Bay. There is a lot of stuff to choose from, the entire day was interesting throughout. The day started with a keynote from Scott McGregor, the CEO of Broadcom. I’ll cover that in a separate posting.
Next up was Andrea Lati of VLSI Research on The Cycle: Is It Different This Time?… Read More
Twelve Years of Sonics at Toshiba
Sonics announced today that Toshiba has completed the SoC design using Sonics’ on-chip network IP for its new TZ2100 group of application processors. The TZ2100 group of applications processors are the newest addition to Toshiba’s ApP Lite (Application Processor Lite) TZ2000 series. With this group of ApP Lite devices, sound… Read More
Wanna Buy a Used Stepper? Only One Owner, Mint Condition…
Back in the early 90s there used to be a billboard alongside 237 advertising second-hand fab equipment: steppers, ion implanters, diffusion ovens. It used to amuse me as an “only in silicon valley” thing; after all, even in silicon valley the number of individuals who were likely to be in a position to buy used fab equipment… Read More
Tizen, Is It a Thing?
I’m not at CES so I’m reporting second hand. But Samsung made some announcements and, since they didn’t make any mobile announcements, people were disappointed. Like Don Dingee, I think that any major mobile announcements will be done in March at Mobile World Congress. Although CES is starting to get a little… Read More
Secure Microprocessors the Andes Way
Microprocessor vendors such as Andes have been saying for some time that security requires extensive hardware support. In particular, embedded processors in intelligent sensors inside IoT chips are now popular targets for hackers, who find it easy to change the program code and system parameters to alter the operation of the… Read More
IEDM: FD-SOI Down to 10nm
The big picture is that planar semiconductor transistors don’t really work below 20nm. The reason is that the gate does a poor job of controlling the channel since too much channel is too far from the gate and so there is a lot of leakage even when the transistor is nominally off. So the channel needs to be made thinner. One way … Read More
New Vivado Release. And a Competition!
It is not entirely clear what Xilinx is these days. Of course it is an FPGA company. If you hear the word FPGA then I bet Xilinx is the first thing you think of. But what Xilinx ships these days is a far cry from the type of device it created when it was starting, where FPGAs were largely used to vacuum up all the glue logic around the processors… Read More
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